Leadership, Higher Education, and Web 2.0

28th June 2008

posted in leadership, web 2.0 |

These are a few of my notes from EduBloggerCon San Antonio sessions on school leadership and pre-service teacher education issues for our web 2.0 world on 28 June 2008. MY COMMENTS AND THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Critical issues for administrators: Asking and answering the questions:
- What is learning?
- What should

Motto of some urban educators in the Philadelphia schools (according to Chris L):
“If you are not afraid of losing your job, you should not have your job.”
- we have to know what we do matters

How do you help principals “get there” with understanding technology

one of the big assumptions we make that is FALSE is that college students are tech literate in all domains

in the past we have been teaching APPLICATIONS not concepts
- we need to teach teachers how to WRITE with these new tools

in many cases kids don’t think of social networking as “technology”

Twitter has really fast forwarded professional development for many

Successful PD environment for higher ed:
- showing a tool and then giving TIME for the faculty to use it (like a wiki)
- Time is the key thing

Mike Baker:
- Sending out a “What Is” video regularly to all faculty

“The Tempered Radical” does VoiceThreads

Have teachers write down 3 goals for what they wanted to do in PD time
- and then at the end of the day, teachers reflected and wrote down what they learned
- playing the part of customer service in helping teachers with their PD

instructor asks students to just learn 1 thing
- then through cognitive apprenticeship

so important for students to be co-learners with their teachers

question and answer networks are needed
- everyone has latent knowledge, how do we get that knowledge shared out

one is “Yetta” (Hebrew for “knowledge”)
- keeping the knowledge accessible for others

stories of colleges where professors have asked for all the Wifi connectivity to be turned off
- asking for mirrors at the back of the classrooms so they can watch student screens
- the big challenge in 1:1 is getting the college professors to USE the tools

UT Austin has worked more on the professional development for students and teachers

many schools are more worried about how they are going to buy and pay for laptops, rather than HOW they are going to use them!
- this is true for K-12 schools as well as colleges

barrier that keeps coming up: we have lots of teachers who want to keep teaching the same way

SDSU is teaching and sharing Machinima

analogy of how we teach engineers: sharing base skills that can be used to move forward and solve problems

Using empathy and asking teachers: “Is it getting harder now?”
- are your kids used to be connected outside of school?
- challenge is: facilitating learning

Mike Baker again:
- analogy of the new way of high jumping (Fosbury Flop)

at most colleges there is no real incentive for faculty using new media tools
- there are no technology renewal credit
- but a lot of faculty really want to use these tools and learn about them

Problem with colleges inventing their own tools is that it many not be available when students leave the college and go to a rural school

Maybe we need more teaching about subversion (”Teaching As A Subversive Activity” by Neil Postman was mentioned)

Idea for PD for faculty as well as K-12 teachers: Take presentations from the K-12 Online Conference and use it to provide blended PD: Have the educators watch the video in advance, and then get together to discuss it

using “technology for substance” is easier now than it ever was

new theory
- Ira Socol has a toolbelt theory that comes to special education
- how to find the tools they need to use
- provide opportunities for people to discover, learn and use these new tools
- blog post about “Toolbelt Theory” from March 2008

vital skill: being able to evaluate and assess tools is very important

when railroads were built: that is how the west expanded
- when the Internet was built, that was important, but there had to be SITES and places to go

right now we are just building those roads

[THIS IS A GREAT METAPHOR: BUILD A ROAD. NOW TEACHERS CAN BUILD THOSE ROADS TOGETHER]

power of collective intelligence
- lead by expectation
- lots of times it is NOT just about US teaching THEM

it is not as important today in teacher education for students to create learning objects, more and more kids are learning to make Inspiration templates
- many are not published and shared, many are discarded and not shared
- PowerPoint slideshows, Jeopardy games, etc.

Mahara is a new open source ePortfolio tool that just came out with 1.0 tool

issue of who is hosting the data?
- when does it go away? will it go away?
- not many teachers are hosting their content on their own site
- [SOME TEACHERS ARE PROHIBITED BY THEIR DISTRICT FROM HOSTING THEIR OWN SITE THAT STUDENTS SHARE CONTENT ON.]

Future Kansas Teachers Scouting Site is an example of a social networking project that is trying to do this: connect pre-service teachers

Push-back on everyone talking about Ning
- David Warlick started the WikiPedia article on edu-punk (do it yourself teaching)
- think about the walls that people put up

without carrots for faculty like we saw in many PT3 faculty development programs, it is very hard to do

small group mentoring is key
- have a lot of conversations, find out who is interested, and share lots of ideas
- through word of mouth then the ideas get shared

On this day..

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 4:19 pm and is filed under leadership, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On June 29th, 2008, Peter said:

Hi I am in a teacher’s PD course on technology and I have been taking a number of PD courses our the last 3 yrs while this is my 6th year teaching internationally (physics high school). I have been wondering what leadership (admin) have been looking at what the colleges are doing or not doing. Is there any data out there that shows what colleges are doing? The trend is toward differentiation, technology, alignment of curriculum. What is the trend in colleges and universities? Any idea? Thanks

2 On June 29th, 2008, Ira Socol said:

Despite his anti-tech ‘reputation’ I always begin with Postman (and Weingartner) and “Teaching as a Subversive Activity.” In that book you’ll see how they outline how technology (the technology of 1967) has altered cognition and learning, but you’ll see something else essential:

I was lucky enough to attend a Postman-designed alternative school. The essence was the shattering of the school’s walls and time schedules. Very little happened “in a classroom,” and not much occurred “as scheduled within a school day.” Students, individually, in groups, even as “classes,” reached out into the world for personally appropriate and effective resources - The New York Public Library or Grand Central Terminal after midnight (a psychology class). Universities across New York or the nearest hospital (most people studying life sciences). The city’s planning department (social studies), police department (sociology), parks department (biology students planted a heritage farm), museums, businesses, the New York Aquarium, random experts people had heard of or were directed to by the faculty. There were no course sequences, no required routes, no grading.

Now all of that was “relatively” easy in a school a few miles from 42nd Street (though school officials had to understand that they would have no idea where students physically were). But it was impossible in most of America until the technology of the internet came along. Now, everyone can do it.

And I remember the results to - no special ed services needed. 95% graduation rate. 85% 4-year-college attendance rate. And “alternative school kids” who’ve ended up as doctors, lawyers, teachers, diplomats, artists, authors, journalists, and everything else.

We learned how to find our learning tools and use them. And that’s the world’s most important skill.

3 On June 29th, 2008, Bill Ferriter said:

Hey Wes,

Thanks a ton for taking time to post your notes from San Antonio! It’s literally killing me to not be there—but I’m doing a pretty good job keeping up with the conversation via blogs and Twitter.

What resonates with me in your thread of conversation here is the importance of giving school leaders opportunities to find value in using digital tools for their own learning.

So often, the school leaders that I interact with are able to talk a good talk about the important role that digital tools can play in helping students to learn, but because they lack practical experience, they struggle to “actualize” that vision because digital tools haven’t enhanced their own professional growth in the ways that they’ve enhanced ours!

Providing leadership, therefore, is difficult—it’s based on theory instead of experience.

For me, Voicethreads have been valuable in giving school leaders experiences with digital learning. My favorite experiences have been structured, school-wide conversations around school mission and visions:

http://ed.voicethread.com/share/113288/

I chose Mission and Vision because they are issues near and dear to every school leader’s heart. I can’t think of an administrator that doesn’t recognize the important role that clear mission and vision statements have in a school culture.

And when school leaders see the quality of conversations that can be had through digital tools, they’re often hooked. Their work has been made easier and the dialogue in their buildings has been enhanced.

As technology advocates, I think that should be our central goal—-finding digital tools that can facilitate or enhance the professional growth of school leaders.

It might be creating a Pagecast of school administrator blogs that our principals can follow easily. It could be a Google Doc Survey of the faculty on critical issues. It might be an asynchronous conversation between colleagues or Skyping in an expert to offer advice.

Whatever it is, we’ve got to steal Ira’s idea and show principals how to “find learning tools and use them.”

Because that’s definitely the world’s most important skill.

Anyway…thanks again for sharing. For a guy trapped in NC, it is much appreciated!

Rock on,
Bill